How Teenagers Deal with their Privacy on Social Network Sites?
Results from a National Survey in France
Thomas Stenger and Alexandre Coutant
Poitiers University, France, CEREGE, CEPE
186 rue de Bordeaux, 16 000 Angoulême, France
stenger@iae.univ-poitiers.fr
coutant.alexandre@gmail.com
the recent agreement with 17 social platforms and specific
EC funded projects such as “Insafe3”, dedicated to help
parents and teachers guide children in their safe
exploration of the World, are focusing in particular on
teenagers’ privacy and SNS. Most of the existing academic
research on SNS has focused on identity management, selfpresentation, online friendships and privacy concerns,
especially with regard to teenagers. Some SNS (not all of
them) enable users to control the level of privacy for their
own profile, but this does not mean that users, especially
teenagers, actually do so. First it is necessary to explore
whether teenagers feel concerned with their privacy whilst
using SNS. Secondly, if they do (and some of them do in
certain circumstances as will be explained), it is interesting
to analyze how they deal with this issue and manage both
their privacy and identity online.
Thus, this paper proposes to examine the case of privacy
concerns and privacy management for teenagers on SNS,
according to a national survey being carried out in France
since January 2008 by two University research teams in
management sciences, sociology and computing, for the
French National Postal Service.
Abstract
This paper proposes to examine the case of privacy concerns and
privacy management for teenagers on Social Network Sites,
according to a national survey being carried out in France since
January 2008 by two University research teams in management
sciences, sociology and computing, for the French National Postal
Service.
Teenagers and social network sites
It is evident that Social network sites (SNS) have been
the big internet phenomenon over the past few years. We
define these sites as web-based services that allow
individuals to:
(1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a
bounded system, (2) identify a list of other users with
whom they share a connection, (3) view and traverse their
list of connections and those made by others within the
system - the nature and nomenclature of these connections
may vary from site to site (boyd, Ellison, 2007) - and (4)
base their interest mainly on these first three points and not
on any particular activity (Stenger, Coutant, 2010, 2009a).
From the early success of Friendster to the rise of
Facebook, these sites are particularly popular with
teenagers in Europe and in the United States, where they
represented about 35 % of users in September 20091 (see
also Ofcom 2008, ComScore, 2008, 2009).
The media link their popular success with the potential risk
regarding privacy (cf. infra). On this subject, users around
the world behave in very different ways, from ignorance
and lack of concern to strong collective demonstration and
activism, as Facebook experienced with the “beacon
widget” or the “Newsfeed group”. Meanwhile, SNS are
vigorously requested by regulators, particularly in Europe
(cf. the European Commission2 - EC) to help users protect
their privacy, especially in the case of young people. The
creation of the “social networking task force” in April
2008 within the EC, new EC directives on online privacy,
1. Teenagers’ privacy on SNS in Press literature
It is interesting to note that popular press coverage of
SNS has emphasized potential privacy concerns, primarily
concerning the safety of younger users (boyd and Ellison,
2007). Over the last two years, this phenomenon has
increased all around the world, each country identifying
potential threats to private information usage (e.g. the New
York times and Le Monde – in France – regularly publish
articles on online personal exposure and identity theft ; the
BBC’s investigation into how to harvest personal data on
Facebook4 ; the editing of “Marc’s biography” by Le Tigre
(a French newspaper) based on personal data gathered
online5 ...). The idea that giving up your privacy is a cost of
3
http://www.saferinternet.org/
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/
7375772.stm>
5
<http://www.le-tigre.net/Marc-L.html>
1
4
For daily statistics, see <http://www.checkfacebook.com/>
2
<http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/social_networ
king/index_en.htm>
169
being shared with socio-professional status6. Results
clearly show that the lower the social status, the higher the
amount and intimacy of information shared. Thus, privacy
management in online contexts appears to be becoming
socially discriminatory and may be associated with the risk
that French politicians are calling “digital divide”.
living online has even been debated in various magazines
in Europe and in the USA.
Researchers have investigated the potential threats to
privacy associated with SNS, beginning with work on user
practices since 2005. The results are controversial.
The first research results identified the gap between users’
opinions about privacy and their behavior (Acquisti and
Gross, 2006 ; Stutzman, 2006 ; Barnes 2006 ; Gross and
Acquisti, 2005), that they would like to protect their
privacy but do not necessarily manage to do so. This
“privacy paradox” evoked by many authors is explained in
several ways. Teenagers are not always aware of the public
and open nature of the platforms, nor do they necessarily
know that they could set and control their privacy. Dwyer
et al. (2008) explain that teenagers do not realize how
much their private life is exposed, nor do they realize who
else can access their profile. Ellison et al. (2007) report in
their research on Facebook users that 70% either did not
know they could set the privacy settings and control their
account, or that their profile was visible by the entire MSU
network. Only 13% limited access only to their friends.
But other survey results show a different perspective of the
situation. The Pew Survey indicates that teens are aware of
potential privacy threats online and as a consequence adopt
specific behaviors: 66% of teenagers using a profile report
that it is not visible to all Internet users (Lenhart &
Madden, 2007). Of the teenagers with completely open
profiles, 46% reported that they included at least some
false information, protecting themselves by doing so – and
because fake information is part of the fun on SNS.
However, it must be assumed that online privacy
management on SNS involves multiple user competences.
Technical skills are required and, as the platform evolves,
the ability to learn to use online tools and devices is
fundamental. The ability to control the impression given
and manage social contexts is also of crucial importance as
SNS lead to exposure, invasion or social convergence
when online, and disparate social contexts glide into one
(boyd, 2008). Online, the disappearance or the lack of clear
context drives users to imagine their profile’s audience and
they are often misguided. Because online practice deals
with friendship-driven activities in familiar contexts (Ito et
al., 2008), young people are tempted to believe that their
friends represent their audience, whereas the audience can
be much broader (boyd, 2007).
Researchers in social network analysis have also shown
some interest in privacy on SNS. Lewis et al. (2008)
observe a mimetism among students as far as privacy
management on Facebook is concerned. Students are more
likely to have a private profile if their friends and roommates have one. They also observe statistically that women
are more likely to have private profiles than men, and that
having a private profile is associated with a higher level of
online activity. In conclusion, the “taste for privacy” is
considered to be a personal and cultural trait.
Privacy also deals with social position, as highlighted by a
recent French study trying to link the kind of information
2. Methodology
This research project started in January 2008 and relies on
in-depth interviews of 65 French teenagers and young
adults (14-27 years old), 22 months of online participative
observation on the most popular SNS in France (Facebook,
Skyrock, Myspace, Netlog, Lexode), an analysis of the
platform design with computer scientists and a systematic
profile analysis. The main issues considered deal with a
definition of these sites and a specific methodology, what
activities are teenagers actually doing online, what do
‘profiles’ or ‘friends’ mean for them, how do they learn to
use these sites and incorporate them into their everyday
life, and is there a link with consumption in these activities
(Stenger, Coutant, 2010, 2009a, b, c).
3. Is privacy on SNS an issue for French teenagers?
In order to understand how teenagers define the kind of
information they are giving out on SNS, we asked the
teenagers who were interviewed about subjects such as:
Are you aware of the debate dealing with privacy on
SNS and do you care? Have you changed the default
privacy on your profiles and why? Do you differentiate
between some kinds of personal information you
wouldn’t like to see on these sites? Have you ever had
trouble with maintaining your privacy on SNS? Who
would you not want to see the information you are
sharing on your profile?
As seen in the literature, the results are quite paradoxical,
but in different ways. Firstly, the interviews reveal that
almost all teenagers admit knowing that this information is
public: “one wouldn’t publish it if one didn’t want others to
know” one of them tells us. Having admitted that, they
maintain that they are fully responsible, and that they are
already sharing this information through other resources,
such as emails or off-line conversations. However on the
other hand, they are fairly reluctant with regard to what
employers might think about them. On this latter point, the
older teenagers interviewed said they are concerned that
future employers may judge them because of the
information available on their profile. Younger people
share a very different point of view: basically, they do not
care. This is one of the most interesting issues of this
survey: linking these anxieties to the prospect of joining
the working population. On the one hand, all of those
interviewed share the opinion that what they are doing on
6
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http://sociogeek.admin-mag.com/resultat/Echantillon.html
fact, most of their activities must not being interpreted as
face values. The understanding of the switch from face
value to private joke thus requires an intimate
understanding of the people involved.
The answers given show that if teenagers clearly
distinguish between their audiences, SNS pose problems
only when they do not allow you easily to keep these
audiences separate. Technical options as well as social
tactics allow young people to deal with most of their
audiences and to keep social contexts separate, with the
exception of employers. As far as predators are concerned,
educators must handle the fact that teenagers do not
understand the risks they are facing on SNS, and must
teach them to distinguish between a search for an
individual and the seeking of a type/category of person,
which is possible through more general geographical
information. We will now analyze more deeply how
teenagers succeed or not in managing this privacy on SNS.
these sites isn’t important. As far as they are concerned,
they say they are just « hanging out » (an expression found
in both our verbatims and in boyd and Ito & al.’s surveys),
(boyd, 2007, 2008; Ito & al., 2008) or chatting about
parties. On the other hand, an increase in anxiety is clearly
perceptible as they progress through the school stages:
schoolchildren and high school students do not feel
concerned, university level students begin to feel a little
anxious when commencing professional training courses
(provoking anxiety in barely 50% of students) and only
those closest to an outlet to possible job opportunities
admit to being very anxious (several talk about quitting
SNS, even if they don’t do so).
Let’s emphasise here the media attitude, which is
illustrative of what researchers are calling “media panics”
(Milligen, 2006; Mc Robbie, 1994; Critcher, 2003). The
media are playing a large role in the rise of anxiety in some
teenagers, as early interviews, from the beginning of 2008
before the media started to report regularly on privacy risks
on SNS, did not reveal any particular fears of being
observed. In fact only one type of “invisible audience”
boyd refers to (2008) is posing problems. Indeed, being
observed by parents or being hounded by predators does
not appear to concern teenagers, as they believe that they
are easily able to escape them. They spoke of the same
kind of tactics boyd has already highlighted in her studies
for escaping parents or educators (boyd, 2007, 2008): by
creating fake or “official” profiles, using nicknames or
changing several letters in their name, disclosing their
profile addresses only in places where guardians can’t see
them (during school breaks or on instant messengers). As
far as predators are concerned, teenagers do not regard the
risk that they be contacted as important because they don’t
see how predators could find them on the Web or offline.
One can see that they are confusing protection against their
guardians, for whom pen names and false names make it
difficult to find a particular person, with that against
predators, who are not looking for a particular person and
can land on any profile. In this way, we perceive a relative
incompetence in protecting themselves against being
identified: they do not all give their real address or their
phone number but they often indicate their school, talk
about their activities and the clubs they belong to, and
share numerous photos of themselves in various
identifiable locations.
The teenagers were also asked about one last type of
“invisible audience”. Privacy does not appear to be a
concern when it comes to brands, marketing services or to
data set by SNS. As far as this particular audience is
concerned, young people do not feel at all threatened!
Discussing the use of their personal information by
companies and marketing services or by SNS in order to
increase targeted ads leaves them completely indifferent.
Neither do they care about what kind of information may
be used by an application they install on their Facebook
profile. They argue that their activities are mainly
“friendship-driven online activities” (Ito & al., 2008), and
even doubt that this data could be useful in any way. In
4. Teenagers’ Identity and Privacy Management on
SNS: issues, skills and tactics
Privacy management isn’t just about one’s own feeling of
confidence in these sites. Privacy management must be
understood as an individual set of skills that goes deeper
than conscious and voluntary behaviours. As far as
teenagers are concerned, these skills deal on the one hand
with creating an autonomous space for their generation and
keeping it safe from others, on the other hand with
promoting themselves by constructing a space looking
« cool » for their peers.
This second set of skills is the more obvious, as teenagers
are very preoccupied with interacting with their peers so
that they look popular. Several studies have already
highlighted how teenagers used these sites to watch and
imitate the actions of the most popular people (boyd, 2007;
Ito & al., 2008). SNS could even be seen as a second
chance for the less popular teenagers in offline contexts
(Zywica, Danowski, 2008). French teenagers have quite
similar preoccupations. Nevertheless, the kind of skills
required in what Goffman calls ‘interaction order’
(Goffman, 1983) are shared by everyone. One can observe
an importation of the rules of interaction which are easily
adapted to the technical specificities of SNS. It bypasses
the auto-censorship of potentially delicate information.
Teenagers are particularly aware of the necessity of
portraying another face (Goffman, 1974) and they prove
they can handle the fact that identity is a construction made
as much by others as by oneself. The negotiations around
each self -production are totally fixed, whether that be
technically because of the design of the SNS which
encourages positive creations (Facebook only permits us to
“like” other people’s actions, “anti” groups are forbidden),
or socially through collective penalties, and exclusion, of
tactless participants. The role distance shown by people
interacting protect themselves as each interactant plays his
own role in an ironic or distanced way: all the teenagers
claim that they know that their activity is just a waste of
171
computing7.Users were contradictory when we asked them
if these concerns they evoked strongly, often repeating
actual media assertions, had prompted a change of
behaviour for them or a greater concern about the privacy
settings proposed by SNS, simply indicated their intention
to find out more, but without real conviction.
This paradox lies in their incapacity to conceive that these
common, ordinary interactions which they believe to be
pointless, uninteresting, can end in not so pointless
consequences, in contexts which they do not yet know
well. Here they did not show either technical skills to
protect their data, or abstract skills to identify what
information might be dangerous or examined. Finally they
develop a resigned attitude towards the risk of being
observed (an 18 year old girl tells us "if I withdraw from
Facebook, they can still publish everything all the same...
so...").
These difficulties in developing skills in privacy
management can be linked to a much more worrying and
wider question now faced by our western societies in
which classic media evolution already raises the problem
of a necessary re-definition of what is meant by the notions
of privacy, intimacy, public and professional life, and also
the connection that each maintains with the others. The
risks associated with the decompartmentalization of
contexts, which is putting in danger our ability to manage
our own personal dimensions, appear to be surmounted in
numerous cases by teenagers thanks to classic tools as
protection of the face, the role distance and the play with
the limits of the social and technical norms framing our
interactions (Certeau, 2002). On the other hand, effective
management of our private lives in all social spheres is
even less possible as these spheres are themselves being
redefined.
Two of those questioned nevertheless claimed to have
strong skills in selecting information to be diffused and
preserving the separation between the various social
spheres within which they evolved. They had naturally set
up these safety options even before the media panic began
and discussed these precautions in a relatively assured and
very knowing way. This control can be connected to a skill
which they already exercised offline. In individual
interviews these two people both declared themselves to be
homosexual and that they had to hide this aspect of their
identity in certain contexts. They at once made the
connection between their everyday life offline and their
need for careful usage of SNS. A skill in privacy
management offline was thus reinvested in an online
context and initiated a technical learning skill with regard
to the environment.
time. SNS are much appreciated by teenagers to manage
their everyday relationships with their peers. It allows them
to manage more effectively many difficult activities
(flirting, dating, quarrels between friends) by benefitting
from the specific aspects of the tool: asynchronous
discussions, body-effacement which is a specific teenager
issue as the body is so hard to handle with during
adolescence (breaking of the voice, blushing, sweating…).
Teenagers even poach (Certeau, 2002) these specific
aspects to allow themselves to break the rules for just a
moment: some of them create fake profiles to spy on
others, or to say things that they would not normally say
publicly.
SNS are not concerned with how teenagers are managing
their private life as far as self-management is concerned.
They largely control the norms of the interaction.
Technology allows the merging of a stronger interaction,
where the device allows teenagers to learn more easily how
they appear in public and that risk relies more on the
invasion of other aspects of their offline life. The teenagers
interviewed admitted dedicating a great deal of time
hanging out on these sites, even going as far as connecting
when in class, whenever they have the opportunity. This
confession causes real tension with parents and also with
teachers.
The first set of skills appears to be shared by fewer people.
We already mentioned above that people were usually
unaware of their privacy exposure on the Internet (Dwyer
et al., 2008). The “privacy paradox” highlighted in the
literature could also be explained by the lack of
understanding of two characteristics of the new media: the
width of their scalability and their persistence, (boyd,
2008). French teens are facing the same situation. If more
and more profiles are henceforth inaccessible on Facebook,
this change relies more on the decision of the platform to
make them closed by default rather than by the active
initiative of those being observed. When asked about
privacy settings, the majority of the youths never
customized their profile and a large number of them were
unaware of these options. They were aware that it was
possible to ascertain a lot of information about individuals:
friends, pages and groups, status, profile photos, etc. As far
as Skyrock is concerned, this lack of competence becomes
very worrying, as the fact that the profiles are visited is
actually appreciated by teenagers because it promotes an
ingenious game of popularity evaluation measured by the
number of visits and comments. As most of the site users
were the youngest of the teenagers we analysed, they were
both less concerned and less skilful. This allows any
invisible audience to surf on the different profiles without
any restrictions.
In this paradox lays an important part of the understanding
of the lack of privacy management by users of SNS. The
fear conveyed by media panics has not urged users to
improve their skills. At best some evoke some advice
received from their more skilful friends in
7
This offline learning by friendly mutual help seems to confirm
Lewis, Kaufman and Christakis’s results (2008) evoked above :
students whose friends have private profiles will tend to possess
private profiles too.
172
5. Conclusion and Perspectives
This study highlights that although privacy management is
a problem people have to deal with when they are using
SNS, several cases must be highlighted. It all depends on
who is the observer. It is only future employers that are
worrying users, as they believe they can handle both
educators as well as predators. This allows us to propose
three kinds of actions for educators: let teenagers make
their own generational norms, accompany them in their
construction of a space away from professional life, and
teach them the difference between the possible audiences
and how to prevent anyone undesirable to link their online
and offline life. Another distinction has to be made
between the various kinds of information that people are
sharing on these sites. Users agree, and even want, to share
most of this information. The main trouble appears to come
from the lack of awareness of how public these spaces are.
People believe they are in a public place that remains still
quite intimate, just as when they are spending time with
their friends in offline public places, whereas in fact their
personal data can be accessed in a far wider space. This
awareness increases as teenagers grow older but the
durability of the information they have shared during their
first years of using these sites makes them visible for a
very long time. Having acknowledged this fact,
educational programs taught to students in their first years
of university would be better initiated in secondary school.
A final distinction must be made between SNS that provide
different kinds of privacy settings: Skyrock is available to
absolutely anyone and one has to find his own tactics to
protect his identity, whereas other sites like Facebook or
Myspace offer several levels of visibility for the profiles.
As we have seen, privacy cannot be managed only by
technical tools or a ‘charter of good behaviour’. We have
highlighted how teenagers are good at playing with these
constraints to build a generational structure for interaction.
This interaction structure- remains quite similar to the one
people are dealing with in offline contexts. On the other
hand, new media give new characteristics to information
that people do not seem to be able to deal with: scalability
and persistence. Lawyers and educators will have to focus
on these particularities to improve the privacy management
skills of teenagers in new media concepts.
173
Hodge, M. J. 2006. The Fourth Amendment and privacy
issues on the "new" Internet: Facebook.com and
MySpace.com. Southern Illinois University Law Journal,
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